The Lady in the Palazzo: An Umbrian Love Story |  | Author: Marlena de Blasi
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 285781
Media: Paperback
Pages: 317
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 1
ISBN: 1565126106
Dewey Decimal Number: 910
EAN: 9781565126107
ASIN: 1565126106
Publication Date: May 27, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Marlena di Blasi seduced readers to fall in love with Venice, then Tuscany, with her popular and critically acclaimed books A Thousand Days in Venice and A Thousand Days in Tuscany. Now she takes readers on a journey into the heart of Orvieto, an ancient city in the less-trodden region of Umbria. Rich with history and a vivid sense of place, her tale is by turns romantic and sensual, joyous and celebratory, as she and her husband search for a home in this city on a hill—finding one that turns out to be the former ballroom of a dilapidated sixteenth-century palazzo. Along the way, de Blasi befriends an array of colorful characters, including cooks and counts and shepherds and a lone violinist, cooking her way into the hearts of her Umbrian neighbors.
Brimming with life and kissed by romance, The Lady in the Palazzo perfectly captures the essence of a singular place and offers up a feast—and the recipes to prepare it!—for readers of all stripes.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 12
 Yummy! September 12, 2009
Marilyn WK (PHX, AZ)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Everything di Blasi writes is wonderful if you like food and have a genuine desire to know what it's like to become part of the places where she and her blueberry-eyed Venetian husband, Fernando, travel. They worm their way into the bosom of each community in which they live (one per book), making friends, making a new home, and cooking whatever is fresh and ready to become a mouth-watering lunch or dinner. I highly recommend each of her books, of which this is the fourth. They can be read out of order but I think the reader will get more out of them if they're read in chronological order.
Another gracious experience with marlena and Fernando December 13, 2008
Harold T. Swartz (Florida)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
The author has entranced by wife and me from Venice to Tuscany and now to her home in Umbria.
Her command of the English language makes us run for a dictionary from time to time, but her use of unusual words is always expressing a thought with a diiferent perspective.
We have found her writing so lyrical (in fairness,some sentences over three volumes could be re-written) that we read some paragraphs of her book each morning and look forward to hearing her words again.
She has been a professional chef, and spent years writing about the foods of diifferent European regions. Her description of the foods, with recipies of the area intersticed from time to time, has cause us to join her on her venture through Italy. We have made some of the dishes as we have read the books. A rare way to share the flavor of a writer's experiences.
Marlena lets us see the Umbrian culture, the Umbrian cunning, and the joy of befriending folks from a maid turned restaurant owner to the local marchese. This is always a love story of a lady who found romance after she raised her children. A lady who dared to walk from a comfortable safe life to a daring new one. New in language, new in customs, new in expectations by her and her new countrymen. Delightful reading!
Could not put it down... December 10, 2009
C. Grant (San Francisco)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
...and was sad when it was finished. I've read all her books and this one is my favorite. After spending some time in Orvieto and the surrounding countryside, I could easily picture everything she described. My favorite part is about the ripeness of the melon she buys at the market: this is quintessential Italian life.
Fantastico! November 10, 2008
V. McBride
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
The book is like a delicious dessert, you read it slowly, loving every chapter, never wanting it to end.
Lessons to be learned September 9, 2010
Robert Odean (Ottawa, Canada)
I have just finished reading The Lady in the Palazzo -- At Home in Umbria. This is my first encounter with the American writer Marlena De Blasi who now makes her life in Italy. She lives here in a different world and language, almost as she says, it's like living life new again as a ten year old. This is not the kind of book I would normally read. It was my wife that put this book into my hands.
My wife is in the US Foreign Service; she is presently assigned to the US Embassy in Rome. I am a retired clergyman and college administrator. We have visited Orvieto a number of times, staying at one of its charming hotels close to the Duomo.
Marlena's Lady in the Palazzo opened a door into Italian life that even the opportunities possible to life in the Foreign Service, though well beyond that of a tourist, still does not allow. To have visited Orvieto where Marlena and her husband Fernando live, recognizing in her telling the same streets and shops and merchants, was a special pleasure.
What was more important, however, were the marvelous insights into the human factor -- how people live, how they think and feel. Marlena by virtue of who she is was a challenge to an established culture which we came to understand more clearly as it was carefully explained by Fernando. Yet she was a loving and caring disruption to old and established ways even to the surprise and joy of Fernando.
People changed; some like Neddo and his lifelong enemy, Il Marchese Edgardo d'Onofrio, both found the opportunity for a second chance because of Marlena. The life stories shared with Marlena by her new friends and then she with us were moving. How easy it was to love Miranda and Barlozzo. The survival story of Tilde who claims "all of us are made by a single event" forced me to put down the book and struggle with that thought. If that is so, what was that single event that made me? I may have found it. Not sure.
How special it was to learn that Etruscans collected their tears in little vases believing that tears were the "melting of the soul." Into these little vases they added crushed violets and rose petals to create perfumes with which they anointed their loved ones, "thus giving up their soul for love."
The Lady in the Palazzo is a special book, sensitive and beautifully crafted. By looking into the lives of others and into her own struggle Marlena holds a mirror for us to see ourselves more clearly too. She offers much wisdom like "Once in a while, let life shape itself."
Robert Odean
Showing reviews 1-5 of 12
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